A new ad from Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund shows the pursuit and shooting of a wolf from a small plane and tells viewers that Sarah Palin "actively promotes" such killings. It's true that she does, and in 2007 she offered $150 payments for anyone who brought the left forepaw of a wolf to state officials. The ad calls the practice "brutal and unethical" but doesn't tell the whole story.
Alaskan officials call it "predator control," not aerial hunting, and use it to keep the populations of moose and caribou high for subsistence hunters.
The program is limited to just 9 percent of the state's land mass, or five of 26 Department of Fish and Game districts.
Far from being endangered, as they are in the Lower 48 states, gray wolves number between 7,000 and 11,000 in Alaska.
Here are the bare facts: As a gubernatorial candidate, and since she was elected in 2006, Palin has promoted aerial wolf and bear shooting, which is usually done with a two-seat, fixed-wing Piper Super Cub in winter, when the animals can be tracked more easily. In March 2007, Palin's administration announced that it would offer $150 for the foreleg of each freshly killed wolf, in order to encourage hunters. A lawsuit by Defenders of Wildlife and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance prompted a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the payments, and the state backed off.
Palin also proposed legislation in 2007 that would have allowed aerial shooting of wolverines as well as brown bears and wolves, and would have eased some of the requirements the state had to meet before approving airborne "predator control" in a given sector. The bill passed the House but died in Senate committee last spring; Palin has vowed to reintroduce it. So the ad is accurate on that score, as well.
If you think the explanation above implies a more complicated landscape than the ad shows us, you're correct. In the first place, while gray wolves are listed as an endangered species in the Lower 48, and great efforts have been made to reintroduce them in some Western states, they are abundant in Alaska.
Second, it's not for nothing that wolves have acquired their big, bad reputations. Studies indicate that predators (wolves and bears) often take 70 percent to 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die each year in Alaska. Research by the state Department of Fish and Game shows that "a single wolf eats 12-13 moose in a typical year and/or 30-40 caribou, mostly calves." (Whether it's "and" or "or" would seem important, but we'll let that one slide for now.)
Third, the state doesn't refer to the practice as aerial hunting; to Alaska officials, it's "predator control." The federal Airborne Hunting Act, passed in 1971 in response to a national outcry against aerial hunting in Alaska, prohibits shooting at or harassing any bird, fish, or other animal from aircraft. Exceptions are allowed if the federal government or a state finds aerial hunting is needed to protect "land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life, or crops." In those cases, programs must be developed, individuals must obtain government permits to do the hunting, and state officials must report facts and figures to the feds on a regular basis.
The program exists in large part because the state's intensive game management law puts a premium on efforts to "restore the abundance or productivity of identified big game prey populations as necessary to achieve human consumptive use goals." The "big game prey" in question are the approximately 1 million caribou and 175,000 to 200,000 moose in the state. Subsistence hunters are a major priority in wildlife management in Alaska, although a subsistence hunter is hard to define. Clarke offered some statistics: About 20 percent of Alaska's population, or roughly 135,000 people, is classified as rural. About 92 percent to 100 percent of rural Alaskans use wild fish for food to some extent, and 79 percent to 92 percent use wildlife. Palin, herself a hunter, might live in too urban an area to be included in these statistics, but she has said she eats moose and other game.
State law is so favorable to hunters that it requires the state to have a hunting season before school starts in fall "[f]or the purpose of encouraging adults to take children hunting."
Is the aerial hunting or predator control that takes place in Alaska brutal, cruel, unethical savagery, as the ad says? That's a personal judgment call we'll have to leave to our readers. Alaskans themselves remain deeply divided on the issue. "We have knock-down, drag-out debates even within the [Fish and Game] department on these things," said Clarke.
I started laughing and said...your right and went on to explain that this election as mentioned to him before has many people very passionate about the issues and how we are all so tired how everything has been run. And so on and so on. 
In light of the barrage on negative press against her, I do tend to give her a bit of a break. If I believed EVERYTHING I read about her, she would look like this.
popcorn ready....and my soda and salsa and chips. 
my kids are elated because they can be on the computers during the whole debate and sooner.
